PHP setup

[steelville <steelville@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I must be missing something somewhere.

I'm starting up with Bryan Kelly's PHP book. Great book, I used his RPG 
books a lot for teaching the language.
First step was getting XAMPP implemented. I followed his (and Apache 
Friends') steps, but now need help hurdling a snag.

I did the following, steps summarized for brevity:

_1__Dowloaded the zip file (Apache Friends' option 2).

_2__Extracted to C:\XAMPP.

_3__Clicked on xampp.start.exe..
    ...whereupon the DOS-type Window opened and the appropriate 
messages appeared, after which it disappeared... I did not shut it down 
myself...

_4__I went to the Firefox browswer and typed  http://localhost for the URL.

_5__I hit Enter.

The web page shows up completely blank in Firefox, but IE says "webpage 
cannot be found".

What have I done wrong?

TIA,

Alan